January 10, 2025 • 30 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, John Moses Browning invented the mechanism used in virtually all modern pistols, created the most popular hunting rifles and shotguns, and conceived the machine guns introduced in World War I. Here's his story.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories. Few people are
aware of that John Moses Browning, a tall, modest man
born in eighteen fifty five and raised as a Mormon
in the American West, invented the mechanism used in virtually
all modern pistols. He created the most popular hunting rifles
(00:31):
and shotguns, and conceived the machine guns introduced in World
War One and which dominated air and land battles in
World War Two. Nathan Gorenstein, author of The Guns of
John Moses Browning, is here to tell the story of
this little known American legend whose impact on history ranks
(00:52):
right there with the Wright brothers, Thomas Edison and Henry Ford.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Sorry about the most important American inventor most of your
listeners have never heard of. We grew up knowing about
Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers, Henry Ford. But missing from
that list is another fellow I'd suggest should be on it,
John Moses Browning, who was born in eighteen fifty five
on the far edge of the American West. He died
(01:21):
in nineteen twenty six in the offices of an industrial
complex in Europe that was created on the basis of
his inventions. What did he do. He's the guy whose
machines started World War One and won World War Two
and influenced America and the world to this day. Who
am I. My Name's Nathan Gorenstein. I've spent a career
(01:43):
as a newspaper reporter and editor and now book author.
And I got interested in Browning when I was researching
firearms for another book, and I realized that this guy
had changed the world, but no one had ever written
a serious biography of him. If you go online, there
are tens of thousands of books, articles, videos about his firearms,
(02:07):
which are ubiquitous, and most of you know them under
the names of Colt Winchester, Savage, Remington and in Europe
Fabric Nationale, if I can say that French. But all
those products didn't come from the minds of engineers in
those companies. They came from this guy from Utah who
was born before the telegraph reached his town. So he
(02:31):
was a tall man, over six feet, he was balding,
and he was unknown outside the world of gun manufacturing
until World War One, when America entered the war and
Americans finally learned that dear boys, husbands, sons, brothers were
going to go to war armed with the weapons invented
(02:51):
by one guy who they had never heard of. So
who was this fellow. Well, he was born in Ogden, Utah,
when it was a Mormon town. His father had three wives.
He and his brother Matt, who was important to John
Browning's career, were the offspring of the second wife. Your father,
Jonathan Browning, was a blacksmith and gunsmith, and so John
(03:16):
who went to work. This was the frontier after a while,
so you went to work early. He was at work
in his father's shop at five years old, and this
is in eighteen sixty and for the next fifteen years.
He got what amounted to a PhD in mechanical engineering
and firearms design because his father's shop was located next
to one of the major pioneer trails heading west, and
(03:39):
over the years he saw every kind of firearm imaginable
that he had a fix repair, They built some themselves.
So he had a really like in many sports, you
see some of what and do something and they're really
good and you realize that, well, they're so good because
they were doing it from five years old. Well, he
was so good because he was doing it from a
tiny age. But he had one other advantage that most
(04:04):
of us use in a very basic level every day.
It's called spacial recognition spatial rotation, and so we use
it every day when we pack a suitcase we have
to figure out how things go inside, or we look
at a map and we have to figure out how
to get somewhere. But Browning's great gift was that he
(04:26):
could think in three dimensions. So think of a Rubik's cube.
It's this six sided thing with all these colored cubes,
and you have to rotate them so they line up well.
Most of us find it really hard to do. Browning
is the kind of guy because of his mental skills.
He could have done that in his head and probably
done two or three at the same time. He never
(04:47):
used blueprints, he didn't do working drawings. He didn't have
a computer, he didn't have a slide wou He had
his head. His granddaughter, who is in her nineties now,
told me a great story told to her by her
mother about the elderly Broning sitting in a chair at
night in their house, tapping on his head for hours
(05:07):
at a time. It used to drive the mother crazy.
But what he was doing was thinking through ideas, so
he'd come up with an idea for a firearm, he
would make a couple of rough sketches, sort of like
his own notes that no one else could read, and
then he would cut out templates, flat pieces of metal,
maybe cardboard, that he would work in his hands to
(05:30):
see how they would interact. And then he and his brother,
one of his half brothers. He had a big family
who many of them helped him in his business, would
stand by basic metal working machines and make each part
one at a time. Brining would tell ed, this is
a little thicker, this is a little smaller, and they
would design enormously complicated metal machines to thousands of an
(05:52):
inch tolerances and send them off to factories in the
east which would then make them. They didn't use blueprints,
it was just they made a gun. They would test
that it would work. You can see them in museums
now across the country, and they looked like industrial produced weapons,
but they were made in this small workshop in Ogden, Utah,
by John Browning and his brothers now. Browning was reluctant
(06:16):
to stop designing weapons because he thought that was inventing things.
Don't forget He's out in the western frontier, where he's
sort of in the middle of nowhere and inventing things
were done by the great industrial companies back east, and
he felt he was you know, he didn't want to
do it, and his father had to push him to
do it. One of the things that encouraged him was
that he got married to a woman by the name
(06:37):
of Rachel, and he had a support a family as
a quick aside. Browning was interested in a plural marriage.
Rachel wasn't, and the storyline is that when Browning suggested
it to her, she said, over your dead body. But
so he started inventing guns. He and Rachel would have
ten kids by the way, And then a firearm made
(07:01):
its way to Winchester, which was styby Winchester was famous
for its very original liver action rifles, but they were
trying to develop a bit of gun and the in
house guys couldn't do it. And then one of their
salesman shows up with this really simple but effective, high
powered hunting rifle, the exact kind of thing their people
couldn't make because they wanted it to handle a major
(07:24):
military contridge, a high powered military contridge. So they buy
it from Browning. The head of the company on his
way to San Francisco and business stops in Utah and
buys it for eight thousand dollars the rights to make
the weapon. But Winchester realizes in Browning they have the
real deal because he has other ideas, and he shows
them one of them, which becomes the most famous, second
(07:46):
most famous lover action rifle in the world, and they
buy that heard of some of fifty thousand dollars, which
was a huge amount of money. Don't figure all these
guns are being made under Winchester's name. No one in
the public knows who's designing these firearms. Browning doesn't work
for Winchester, but he sells each of them to the
company for a set sum of money or else goods
(08:09):
to be sold in the sporting goods store that his
brother operates in Ogden. So Browning sort of creates the
Winchester Rifle Company because at that point they have one
old lever action gun. So he creates for them a
single short rifle, a lever action rifle, lever action shotgun,
pump action shotguns. And then he designed the most popular
(08:31):
hunting rifle in America, probably the Winchester thirty thirty lever
action rifle still made today. Over six million have been sold,
and people say it's the rifle that it's taken more
dear than any other rifle in America. But he was
really just getting started.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
And you've been listening to author Nathan Gorenstein tell the
story of John Moses Browning, the man who designed the guns,
the firearms that were used in World War One and
World War Two simminly allowed us to win World War Two,
but also the rifles, the shotguns that we used to
defend ourselves and hunt the man who had the ideas
(09:08):
that became the guns. By the way, we love to
talk about our founders and how they protected intellectual property
rights with the patent in Article one of the US Constitution.
That's how forward thinking they were. When we come back
the story of John Moses Browning, here on our American stories,
(10:09):
and we continue with our American stories and author Nathan Gorenstein,
author of The Guns of John Moses Browning, the remarkable
story of the inventor whose firearms changed the world. Let's
pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
He had an enormous curiosity and once he got an
idea in his head, he couldn't stop working on alternatives
to the initial idea, on advancements to the idea. So,
for example, in eighteen eighty nine, he was out shooting.
He was a big trap shooter, very successful one, I
(10:47):
might add, and they were all practicing one day and
he noticed that the grass which had grown up high
around the shooting range was being blown over by the
gas pot gas the gunpowder coming out of the front
of the rifle. People had recognized that that was energy
going out of the gun, and then maybe you could
do something with that, and they had been ideas kicked around,
(11:08):
but no one had ever made a firearm that tapped
the burning gunpowder the gases to produce energy to operate
a mechanism or Browning went home and the next day
he had a crew prototype made. A newspaper reporter got
into the office. It's the only account we have of
Browning at work, and it describes the inventor pretty excited,
(11:31):
going on and saying, I got this new thing, and
it's going to go a hell winding, he says, once
he pulls the trigger, and the writer caused an automatic rifle. Now,
automatic rifles we know today are for good and ill.
It's the major combat weapon in the world today. Ak's ars.
They were all gas operated firearms or Browning had just
invented the first one in a day, and he used
(11:54):
that basic concept to develop what became the first machine
gun purchased by the American military in eighteen ninety five,
another gas operated gun that wasn't only did. At the
same time he was doing that, he invented the first
semi automatic shotgun, which wild they used today. It made
a huge amount of money for him, and then he
(12:15):
went on to invent the modern pistol. So every handgun
in the world today is essentially based uses as a
mechanism the design Broning invented in eighteen ninety six eighteen
ninety seven. That's the slide action pistol where when you
go to the movies or a cup show and you
see the top of the handgun go back and forth,
(12:35):
that's the slide. That and the internal mechanism of the
slide is what Browning invented. There were a lot of competitors,
many particularly in Europe, there were lots of inventors trying
to make an automatic pistol as they called them. The
only fighted one shot, but they were called automatic pistols,
and there were I'm going to say over probably two
dozen competing concepts at the time, but Broning's was the
(12:59):
only one that left. It is the basis for not
airy but virtually all handguns made in the world today
that can be good or bed, depending how you feel
about it, but no one can deny the historic import
of that. At that point, he and his brother realized
a couple of things that they weren't making as much
(13:20):
money as they could have because they were getting from Winchester.
They had always been getting flat payments, and they wanted
royalties on each gun made. Colt gave them royalties, but
cult at that point wasn't producing that many guns. This
is around nineteen hundred. So Browning and his brother because
they meet a guy at the Colt factory from Philadelphia.
His name was heart Oa Burgh, who's really zellow kind
(13:42):
of guy. He keeps popping up on all these places
across Europe with the Wright brothers a submarine sales. But
at this point he burgs a firearms in you there,
and he had been educated in Liege, Belgium, which had
a large armament making industry going back to fourteen hundred
and so he and Burg hit it off. No, why
do they hit it off? Well, they're in in Yankee, Connecticut.
(14:07):
Browning's a Mormon, and those days Mormons were blasphemous, and
Browning himself, who was a Mormon missionary in Georgia, we
almost got beat off badlete by a mob. You know,
Mormons were bad folks to a lot of people. And
Berg was Jewish. So here were the two sort of
outside of guys. And they become friends. And Burgh is
apparently the only industry person that Browning ever invited back
(14:29):
to Ogdeny. Bronni really kept the two sides of his
business separate, anyway. So Brinning and Berg become friends. Berg
goes back to Belgium and Browning invents the slide action pistol.
He invents three of them, actually, and Colt only wants
to make one. This is the larger, heavy duty one
that they think they can sell to the army. This
guy eventually becomes the famous m nineteen eleven, the s
(14:51):
item of the American Army for US eighty five years.
But the one Bronning likes is this cute little thing.
It's it's about this. I mean, it's a gun, but
it's enormously well engineered, and it's like a little engine
in your hand. Colt doesn't want to make it, and
Berg writer, let us say, well, we'll make it. And
at that point FN, that's Greek Nationale in Belgium had
(15:13):
a factory with nothing to make in it. So in
eighteen ninety eight Broning travels to Belgium and the FN
people go crazy over his gun and they stopped making it,
and that starts a twenty seven to twenty eight year
long relationship between FN and Belgium, and Browning and Bronning
(15:33):
would end up spending almost half of every year in Belgium.
He taught himself French. He did it, his granddaughter tells me,
by looking up words in a French dictionary. Once he
got a couple of words right, he see a word
he didn't understand, look that up, get that translation. If
he saw words in the translation he didn't understand, he'd
(15:54):
look that up. So he was self taught and he
became a fixtion out of French literature. He grew a
goatee and he wore this white Panama hat, and he
was Paul, and he was American from the West, and
he quite intrigued the Belgians. If there's a photographs of
Browning with a slew of FN engineers and he's a
(16:14):
head taller almost than anybody else there. He was considered
a character. But what he did he brought FN and
the city of Liege sort of a great industrial fortune
because they stopped making his little pistol. They made a
couple of different versions, all designed by Browning, and between
nineteen hundred and nineteen fourteen they sold one and a
(16:36):
quarter million of them, and that's about one handgun for
every three or four hundred people in Europe at the time.
That's a lot of guns. And it created a problem.
There's a great German report from around nineteen eleven that
says everyone wants to buy a Browning, and returning from
a culture of the knife, where apprentice would go out,
(16:57):
get a job and buy a fancy knife, now they
want to go out and buy a gun, preferably a briding,
little semi automic pistol. And the problem was was that
these were new things and they were almost like the
iPhone of the time. That's not an exaggeration because people
had never seen a little mechanical device like this. Finally
(17:18):
made beautifully engineered, and you pull the trigger, and what happened?
You got an explosion, You get the brass casing popping out.
The slide moves back and forth, and you hold it
in your hand. And it became a real popular item
among both good people and bad people, I might add.
And so the Germans say, what do we do about this?
Because people didn't appreciate you fire or gun the bullet
(17:39):
will go for a mile.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
And you're listening to Nathan Gorenstein tell the story of
John Moses Browning. And for a while Browning was content
selling his ideas and his designs to Winchester. He got
a flat fee to Colt, he got a royalty, but
Colt didn't have the volume. And in the end Browning
needed a manufacturing home, a place where he could well
(18:03):
not keep it all, but keep control of it all
and make more money for himself and his family. And
he found it in the unlikeliest of places, and found
a partner in Europe, in Belgium, of all places, not
a place one today associates with a manufacture of handguns,
And my goodness, he sold one point four million between
(18:24):
nineteen hundred and nineteen fourteen, and enormous sum and had
enormous influence on all the other manufacturers as well. When
we come back, more of this remarkable story of John
Moses Browning, And by the way, pick up where you
can Nathan Gorenstein's book The Guns of John Moses Browning,
(18:46):
the remarkable story of the inventor whose firearms changed the world.
And indeed they did pick it up at a bookstore
or an Amazon or the usual suspects. Again, when we
come back more of John Moses Browning's story here on
our American stories, and we returned to our American stories
(19:40):
and the story of John Moses Browning. Between nineteen hundred
and nineteen fourteen, Browning sold one and a quarter million
of his slide action pistols, what author Nathan Gorenstein called
the iPhone of its time. Let's return to the story.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
And so the Germans say, what do we do about this?
Because people didn't appreciate you fire or gun the bullet
will go for a mile. You had guys in Europe
and women too, sort of showing off to their friends
and shooting people. You had people and trained doing tiger practice,
not out of any venal aspects, just because they didn't
really understand that they had a weapon in their hands anyway,
(20:22):
and then also starts making another Browning design, which is
the semi automatic shotgun, which is a huge popular thing
in America in Europe. And the Brownings start becoming very
wealthy because they're getting worlties and all these guns. And
back in Ogden, Barning's brother Matt turns out to be
a really good businessman. He becomes a banker, he invests
in companies. They build an opera house with a couple
(20:44):
of other folks in Wagden that's still there in Ogden now,
and he becomes head of the school board and he
becomes one of the major folks in Ogden. And while Barning,
the inventor, is well known in his home state, he's
not in the rest of the country. That doesn't happen
until nineteen seventeen, nineteen eighteen, when America enters World War
(21:04):
One with an army that has no guns essentially, I
mean that's virtually literally, they had like four hundred machine
guns I think, and it was a very small army.
So they had to get arms, and the only person, well,
the arms they chose were John Barning's arms. He had
created before the army asked for it. Between nineteen hundred
(21:26):
and nineteen twelve, on his own, he had created a
modern machine gun and a modern automatic rifle. The rifle
is the Brarning automatic rifle which people are famous, which
is famous for and was used until Vietnam. You see
it in World War two movies all the time, and
it was the first automatic rifle adopted by the American
(21:49):
military and the only one of it. Only it was
far more advanced than any of a couple of versions
that were in use in Europe, which were much larger, heavier, unreliable.
He also ento the thirty caliber machine gun that's also
the machine gun you see in every World War II movie,
either with a vented barrel or with a big water
covered jacket. So we had these designs sitting there, and
(22:11):
so drags them out and they get perfected and they
stop building them in huge numbers. I might add. They're
also issuing his nineteen eleven pistol to troops. So this
one guy is arming the American military except for rifles,
and so he gets all sorts of attention and people
want to know who he is, and there were all
these profiles written about him. But the interesting thing missing
(22:35):
is him. There's not one quote from Browning in any
of these profiles. His brother Matt must have issued press
releases to people about his brother, because a lot of
these artificsts sort of quote the same anecdotes. But you
know they're asked about, well, why do you make guns?
I mean, guns have been controversial with water American history.
(22:55):
The pro gun and anti gun fighter is not new
to this era. Well, one reporter got Browning to agree
to let him paraphrase him, and here's what Broning said
when asked him. He was asked, why didn't you make automobiles?
Browning assured readers that he was a peace loving man
who deplored war, indeed, had spent most of his career
(23:16):
making sporting arms, but was compelled to answer his nation's call.
So Bronning is now famous. But you know he's not kid.
He's in his sixties at this point. He is. His
son and Matt's son are taking over part of the
business side of the operation. But Broning in nineteen eighteen
(23:37):
is asked to invent another gun for the military, and
this gun is probably in historic terms, is probably the
most his significant invention. The tanks had appeared on the
European battlefield, and the American military wanted a machine gun
that was powerful enough to penetrate tank armor, so they
(23:59):
asked Bronning to to create something that could fire a
fifty caliber round. That means a bullet that's a half
inch wide. And so Browning goes to work and he
uses as the basis for that design for the machine
gun he invented in nineteen hundred. So, I mean, that's
how it advanced his mind work and what he invents.
(24:20):
He dies in nineteen twenty six and the gun's not
finished yet. It was so powerful that it was difficult
to keep on target, and brown came up with the
new recoil system and did other things to try and
make a controllable But what he invented is the fifty
caliber machine gun the end. Two. Why is that significant? Well,
(24:40):
every American airplane in World War Two, every fighter plane,
every bomber was armed with Broning's machine guns. So there
wasn't an air battle fought in World War Two by
the Americans that didn't use Bronings guns. His guns also
armed the British Spitfire and Hurricanes thirty guns during the
(25:00):
Battle of Britain and eight guns in each spit fire
and a hurricane. And the British will tell you that's
what won the Battle of Britain. And there's a British
engineer says, you know, fighter planes are great, but I'm
paraphrasing here, but essentially their quot ornaments if you don't
have guns in them that work. And the British had
picked Browning's thirty caliber gun because they were faster and reliable.
(25:22):
You know, if a gun jams and the wing of
an airplane, you can't go out and fix it, so
you had to have something that would work quickly and
that would reliable and wouldn't jam. The same thing with
Browning's fifty caliber gun. So all those P fifty one,
Mustang's Lightnings, Thunderbolts, the B seventeen, the B twenty fours, everything,
I mean that literally is armed with Bronning's machine guns.
But that's not all. So the armies out there and
(25:45):
what do they use their automatic weapons at that time?
At Browning's World War one Browning automatic rifle and this
thirty capital machine gun and it's nineteen eleven pistol and
the only other well, there's two other sort of major weapons,
the garand rifle would which is a major factor, and
the Thompson submachine gun, which looks great but actually wasn't
(26:05):
all that effective because the short of pistol caliber cartridge,
and troops, particularly in the Pacific would complain it didn't
have the power to penetrate vegetation. And that's why they
preferred to Browning because a shot a larger cottridge. But
those were the major firearms used by the American military,
So one can honestly say there wasn't a ground battle
one that wasn't one thanks to Browning's weapons. And again,
(26:30):
you know, that's a major historical impact. You know, there's
not a major historical event in the world that hasn't
been affected by firearms for good or ill. You know,
firearms can save a life, take a life, They could
feed a family, they can wipe out a species. You know,
they occupy a spectrum from good to evil, and what
(26:51):
we do with them is sort of depending on ourselves.
What happened after Browning's death was that his son and
nephew took over the business and they imported guns and
sold them under the Browning name, originally from Belgium, and
then eventually from Japan, mostly made by a very good
(27:13):
firm in Japan called Moroku and sold by FN. It
turned out that in the nineteen seventies FN purchased the
Browning Company that's Fabric Nationale in Belgium, and so the
Winchester rifles designed by Browning and the shotguns sold today
come from Japan and are owned by FN and Belgium.
(27:33):
And the two fifty cab machine gun is still used
by the American Army today and by eighty other countries
around the world. They had in five attempts to replace
it with something lighter with more controlled recoil, but they've
all failed. Bronni would sometimes be challenged on why he
(27:56):
made firearms, and he had a response to that and
get it once in one newspaper article where he's paraphrase
and this is what the article says. He replied to
the effect that the world's need of guns still was greatest,
that the field of arms invention was infinitely larger yet
than that of the motor car. He is, however, an
(28:18):
ardent peace advocate, but recognizes the need of preparedness and
the fact that generations probably must pass through an error
of evolution and the use of force before the nations
will be ready by reason of scientific advancement and intellectual culture,
to beat their guns into plowshares and the swords into
putting books. And that was a wide they held belief
(28:40):
at the time. That was through are books published about
the theory that modern technology would make war impractically impossible.
Unfortunately that hasn't proved to be the case.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
And no, indeed technology did not usher in a world
of peace. But what John Moses Browning accomplished, particularly for
outfitting American soldiers in battle, American planes and British planes
in battle, well it could easily have saved the world
from the Nazi menace and Japanese imperial ambitions. And what
(29:14):
a story. This is a terrific job on the production
by Greg Hengler and a special thanks to Nathan Gorenstein
for sharing the story of John Moses Browning. His book
The Guns of John Moses Browning, the remarkable story of
the inventor whose firearms change the world, is available in
bookstores or wherever you get your books online. And what
a story to tell about the inventiveness that started way
(29:38):
back in that shop of his fathers at the age
of five, We learned this over and over again the
Wright brothers, no big PhDs from colleges know theirs, was
making their way in a bicycle shop as mechanics. And
what we learn here is for fifteen years, as Nathan said,
John Moses Browning got a PhD in firearms engineering. Ever
(30:01):
since he was a boy in his father's shop. The
story of John Moses Browning here on our American stories
And we continue with our American stories. Few people are
aware of that John Moses Browning, a tall, modest man
born in eighteen fifty five and raised as a Mormon
in the American West, invented the mechanism used in virtually
all modern pistols. He created the most popular hunting rifles
(00:31):
and shotguns, and conceived the machine guns introduced in World
War One and which dominated air and land battles in
World War Two. Nathan Gorenstein, author of The Guns of
John Moses Browning, is here to tell the story of
this little known American legend whose impact on history ranks
(00:52):
right there with the Wright brothers, Thomas Edison and Henry Ford.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Sorry about the most important American inventor most of your
listeners have never heard of. We grew up knowing about
Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers, Henry Ford. But missing from
that list is another fellow I'd suggest should be on it,
John Moses Browning, who was born in eighteen fifty five
on the far edge of the American West. He died
(01:21):
in nineteen twenty six in the offices of an industrial
complex in Europe that was created on the basis of
his inventions. What did he do. He's the guy whose
machines started World War One and won World War Two
and influenced America and the world to this day. Who
am I. My Name's Nathan Gorenstein. I've spent a career
(01:43):
as a newspaper reporter and editor and now book author.
And I got interested in Browning when I was researching
firearms for another book, and I realized that this guy
had changed the world, but no one had ever written
a serious biography of him. If you go online, there
are tens of thousands of books, articles, videos about his firearms,
(02:07):
which are ubiquitous, and most of you know them under
the names of Colt Winchester, Savage, Remington and in Europe
Fabric Nationale, if I can say that French. But all
those products didn't come from the minds of engineers in
those companies. They came from this guy from Utah who
was born before the telegraph reached his town. So he
(02:31):
was a tall man, over six feet, he was balding,
and he was unknown outside the world of gun manufacturing
until World War One, when America entered the war and
Americans finally learned that dear boys, husbands, sons, brothers were
going to go to war armed with the weapons invented
(02:51):
by one guy who they had never heard of. So
who was this fellow. Well, he was born in Ogden, Utah,
when it was a Mormon town. His father had three wives.
He and his brother Matt, who was important to John
Browning's career, were the offspring of the second wife. Your father,
Jonathan Browning, was a blacksmith and gunsmith, and so John
(03:16):
who went to work. This was the frontier after a while,
so you went to work early. He was at work
in his father's shop at five years old, and this
is in eighteen sixty and for the next fifteen years.
He got what amounted to a PhD in mechanical engineering
and firearms design because his father's shop was located next
to one of the major pioneer trails heading west, and
(03:39):
over the years he saw every kind of firearm imaginable
that he had a fix repair, They built some themselves.
So he had a really like in many sports, you
see some of what and do something and they're really
good and you realize that, well, they're so good because
they were doing it from five years old. Well, he
was so good because he was doing it from a
tiny age. But he had one other advantage that most
(04:04):
of us use in a very basic level every day.
It's called spacial recognition spatial rotation, and so we use
it every day when we pack a suitcase we have
to figure out how things go inside, or we look
at a map and we have to figure out how
to get somewhere. But Browning's great gift was that he
(04:26):
could think in three dimensions. So think of a Rubik's cube.
It's this six sided thing with all these colored cubes,
and you have to rotate them so they line up well.
Most of us find it really hard to do. Browning
is the kind of guy because of his mental skills.
He could have done that in his head and probably
done two or three at the same time. He never
(04:47):
used blueprints, he didn't do working drawings. He didn't have
a computer, he didn't have a slide wou He had
his head. His granddaughter, who is in her nineties now,
told me a great story told to her by her
mother about the elderly Broning sitting in a chair at
night in their house, tapping on his head for hours
(05:07):
at a time. It used to drive the mother crazy.
But what he was doing was thinking through ideas, so
he'd come up with an idea for a firearm, he
would make a couple of rough sketches, sort of like
his own notes that no one else could read, and
then he would cut out templates, flat pieces of metal,
maybe cardboard, that he would work in his hands to
(05:30):
see how they would interact. And then he and his brother,
one of his half brothers. He had a big family
who many of them helped him in his business, would
stand by basic metal working machines and make each part
one at a time. Brining would tell ed, this is
a little thicker, this is a little smaller, and they
would design enormously complicated metal machines to thousands of an
(05:52):
inch tolerances and send them off to factories in the
east which would then make them. They didn't use blueprints,
it was just they made a gun. They would test
that it would work. You can see them in museums
now across the country, and they looked like industrial produced weapons,
but they were made in this small workshop in Ogden, Utah,
by John Browning and his brothers now. Browning was reluctant
(06:16):
to stop designing weapons because he thought that was inventing things.
Don't forget He's out in the western frontier, where he's
sort of in the middle of nowhere and inventing things
were done by the great industrial companies back east, and
he felt he was you know, he didn't want to
do it, and his father had to push him to
do it. One of the things that encouraged him was
that he got married to a woman by the name
(06:37):
of Rachel, and he had a support a family as
a quick aside. Browning was interested in a plural marriage.
Rachel wasn't, and the storyline is that when Browning suggested
it to her, she said, over your dead body. But
so he started inventing guns. He and Rachel would have
ten kids by the way, And then a firearm made
(07:01):
its way to Winchester, which was styby Winchester was famous
for its very original liver action rifles, but they were
trying to develop a bit of gun and the in
house guys couldn't do it. And then one of their
salesman shows up with this really simple but effective, high
powered hunting rifle, the exact kind of thing their people
couldn't make because they wanted it to handle a major
(07:24):
military contridge, a high powered military contridge. So they buy
it from Browning. The head of the company on his
way to San Francisco and business stops in Utah and
buys it for eight thousand dollars the rights to make
the weapon. But Winchester realizes in Browning they have the
real deal because he has other ideas, and he shows
them one of them, which becomes the most famous, second
(07:46):
most famous lover action rifle in the world, and they
buy that heard of some of fifty thousand dollars, which
was a huge amount of money. Don't figure all these
guns are being made under Winchester's name. No one in
the public knows who's designing these firearms. Browning doesn't work
for Winchester, but he sells each of them to the
company for a set sum of money or else goods
(08:09):
to be sold in the sporting goods store that his
brother operates in Ogden. So Browning sort of creates the
Winchester Rifle Company because at that point they have one
old lever action gun. So he creates for them a
single short rifle, a lever action rifle, lever action shotgun,
pump action shotguns. And then he designed the most popular
(08:31):
hunting rifle in America, probably the Winchester thirty thirty lever
action rifle still made today. Over six million have been sold,
and people say it's the rifle that it's taken more
dear than any other rifle in America. But he was
really just getting started.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
And you've been listening to author Nathan Gorenstein tell the
story of John Moses Browning, the man who designed the guns,
the firearms that were used in World War One and
World War Two simminly allowed us to win World War Two,
but also the rifles, the shotguns that we used to
defend ourselves and hunt the man who had the ideas
(09:08):
that became the guns. By the way, we love to
talk about our founders and how they protected intellectual property
rights with the patent in Article one of the US Constitution.
That's how forward thinking they were. When we come back
the story of John Moses Browning, here on our American stories,
(10:09):
and we continue with our American stories and author Nathan Gorenstein,
author of The Guns of John Moses Browning, the remarkable
story of the inventor whose firearms changed the world. Let's
pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
He had an enormous curiosity and once he got an
idea in his head, he couldn't stop working on alternatives
to the initial idea, on advancements to the idea. So,
for example, in eighteen eighty nine, he was out shooting.
He was a big trap shooter, very successful one, I
(10:47):
might add, and they were all practicing one day and
he noticed that the grass which had grown up high
around the shooting range was being blown over by the
gas pot gas the gunpowder coming out of the front
of the rifle. People had recognized that that was energy
going out of the gun, and then maybe you could
do something with that, and they had been ideas kicked around,
(11:08):
but no one had ever made a firearm that tapped
the burning gunpowder the gases to produce energy to operate
a mechanism or Browning went home and the next day
he had a crew prototype made. A newspaper reporter got
into the office. It's the only account we have of
Browning at work, and it describes the inventor pretty excited,
(11:31):
going on and saying, I got this new thing, and
it's going to go a hell winding, he says, once
he pulls the trigger, and the writer caused an automatic rifle. Now,
automatic rifles we know today are for good and ill.
It's the major combat weapon in the world today. Ak's ars.
They were all gas operated firearms or Browning had just
invented the first one in a day, and he used
(11:54):
that basic concept to develop what became the first machine
gun purchased by the American military in eighteen ninety five,
another gas operated gun that wasn't only did. At the
same time he was doing that, he invented the first
semi automatic shotgun, which wild they used today. It made
a huge amount of money for him, and then he
(12:15):
went on to invent the modern pistol. So every handgun
in the world today is essentially based uses as a
mechanism the design Broning invented in eighteen ninety six eighteen
ninety seven. That's the slide action pistol where when you
go to the movies or a cup show and you
see the top of the handgun go back and forth,
(12:35):
that's the slide. That and the internal mechanism of the
slide is what Browning invented. There were a lot of competitors,
many particularly in Europe, there were lots of inventors trying
to make an automatic pistol as they called them. The
only fighted one shot, but they were called automatic pistols,
and there were I'm going to say over probably two
dozen competing concepts at the time, but Broning's was the
(12:59):
only one that left. It is the basis for not
airy but virtually all handguns made in the world today
that can be good or bed, depending how you feel
about it, but no one can deny the historic import
of that. At that point, he and his brother realized
a couple of things that they weren't making as much
(13:20):
money as they could have because they were getting from Winchester.
They had always been getting flat payments, and they wanted
royalties on each gun made. Colt gave them royalties, but
cult at that point wasn't producing that many guns. This
is around nineteen hundred. So Browning and his brother because
they meet a guy at the Colt factory from Philadelphia.
His name was heart Oa Burgh, who's really zellow kind
(13:42):
of guy. He keeps popping up on all these places
across Europe with the Wright brothers a submarine sales. But
at this point he burgs a firearms in you there,
and he had been educated in Liege, Belgium, which had
a large armament making industry going back to fourteen hundred
and so he and Burg hit it off. No, why
do they hit it off? Well, they're in in Yankee, Connecticut.
(14:07):
Browning's a Mormon, and those days Mormons were blasphemous, and
Browning himself, who was a Mormon missionary in Georgia, we
almost got beat off badlete by a mob. You know,
Mormons were bad folks to a lot of people. And
Berg was Jewish. So here were the two sort of
outside of guys. And they become friends. And Burgh is
apparently the only industry person that Browning ever invited back
(14:29):
to Ogdeny. Bronni really kept the two sides of his
business separate, anyway. So Brinning and Berg become friends. Berg
goes back to Belgium and Browning invents the slide action pistol.
He invents three of them, actually, and Colt only wants
to make one. This is the larger, heavy duty one
that they think they can sell to the army. This
guy eventually becomes the famous m nineteen eleven, the s
(14:51):
item of the American Army for US eighty five years.
But the one Bronning likes is this cute little thing.
It's it's about this. I mean, it's a gun, but
it's enormously well engineered, and it's like a little engine
in your hand. Colt doesn't want to make it, and
Berg writer, let us say, well, we'll make it. And
at that point FN, that's Greek Nationale in Belgium had
(15:13):
a factory with nothing to make in it. So in
eighteen ninety eight Broning travels to Belgium and the FN
people go crazy over his gun and they stopped making it,
and that starts a twenty seven to twenty eight year
long relationship between FN and Belgium, and Browning and Bronning
(15:33):
would end up spending almost half of every year in Belgium.
He taught himself French. He did it, his granddaughter tells me,
by looking up words in a French dictionary. Once he
got a couple of words right, he see a word
he didn't understand, look that up, get that translation. If
he saw words in the translation he didn't understand, he'd
(15:54):
look that up. So he was self taught and he
became a fixtion out of French literature. He grew a
goatee and he wore this white Panama hat, and he
was Paul, and he was American from the West, and
he quite intrigued the Belgians. If there's a photographs of
Browning with a slew of FN engineers and he's a
(16:14):
head taller almost than anybody else there. He was considered
a character. But what he did he brought FN and
the city of Liege sort of a great industrial fortune
because they stopped making his little pistol. They made a
couple of different versions, all designed by Browning, and between
nineteen hundred and nineteen fourteen they sold one and a
(16:36):
quarter million of them, and that's about one handgun for
every three or four hundred people in Europe at the time.
That's a lot of guns. And it created a problem.
There's a great German report from around nineteen eleven that
says everyone wants to buy a Browning, and returning from
a culture of the knife, where apprentice would go out,
(16:57):
get a job and buy a fancy knife, now they
want to go out and buy a gun, preferably a briding,
little semi automic pistol. And the problem was was that
these were new things and they were almost like the
iPhone of the time. That's not an exaggeration because people
had never seen a little mechanical device like this. Finally
(17:18):
made beautifully engineered, and you pull the trigger, and what happened?
You got an explosion, You get the brass casing popping out.
The slide moves back and forth, and you hold it
in your hand. And it became a real popular item
among both good people and bad people, I might add.
And so the Germans say, what do we do about this?
Because people didn't appreciate you fire or gun the bullet
(17:39):
will go for a mile.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
And you're listening to Nathan Gorenstein tell the story of
John Moses Browning. And for a while Browning was content
selling his ideas and his designs to Winchester. He got
a flat fee to Colt, he got a royalty, but
Colt didn't have the volume. And in the end Browning
needed a manufacturing home, a place where he could well
(18:03):
not keep it all, but keep control of it all
and make more money for himself and his family. And
he found it in the unlikeliest of places, and found
a partner in Europe, in Belgium, of all places, not
a place one today associates with a manufacture of handguns,
And my goodness, he sold one point four million between
(18:24):
nineteen hundred and nineteen fourteen, and enormous sum and had
enormous influence on all the other manufacturers as well. When
we come back, more of this remarkable story of John
Moses Browning, And by the way, pick up where you
can Nathan Gorenstein's book The Guns of John Moses Browning,
(18:46):
the remarkable story of the inventor whose firearms changed the world.
And indeed they did pick it up at a bookstore
or an Amazon or the usual suspects. Again, when we
come back more of John Moses Browning's story here on
our American stories, and we returned to our American stories
(19:40):
and the story of John Moses Browning. Between nineteen hundred
and nineteen fourteen, Browning sold one and a quarter million
of his slide action pistols, what author Nathan Gorenstein called
the iPhone of its time. Let's return to the story.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
And so the Germans say, what do we do about this?
Because people didn't appreciate you fire or gun the bullet
will go for a mile. You had guys in Europe
and women too, sort of showing off to their friends
and shooting people. You had people and trained doing tiger practice,
not out of any venal aspects, just because they didn't
really understand that they had a weapon in their hands anyway,
(20:22):
and then also starts making another Browning design, which is
the semi automatic shotgun, which is a huge popular thing
in America in Europe. And the Brownings start becoming very
wealthy because they're getting worlties and all these guns. And
back in Ogden, Barning's brother Matt turns out to be
a really good businessman. He becomes a banker, he invests
in companies. They build an opera house with a couple
(20:44):
of other folks in Wagden that's still there in Ogden now,
and he becomes head of the school board and he
becomes one of the major folks in Ogden. And while Barning,
the inventor, is well known in his home state, he's
not in the rest of the country. That doesn't happen
until nineteen seventeen, nineteen eighteen, when America enters World War
(21:04):
One with an army that has no guns essentially, I
mean that's virtually literally, they had like four hundred machine
guns I think, and it was a very small army.
So they had to get arms, and the only person, well,
the arms they chose were John Barning's arms. He had
created before the army asked for it. Between nineteen hundred
(21:26):
and nineteen twelve, on his own, he had created a
modern machine gun and a modern automatic rifle. The rifle
is the Brarning automatic rifle which people are famous, which
is famous for and was used until Vietnam. You see
it in World War two movies all the time, and
it was the first automatic rifle adopted by the American
(21:49):
military and the only one of it. Only it was
far more advanced than any of a couple of versions
that were in use in Europe, which were much larger, heavier, unreliable.
He also ento the thirty caliber machine gun that's also
the machine gun you see in every World War II movie,
either with a vented barrel or with a big water
covered jacket. So we had these designs sitting there, and
(22:11):
so drags them out and they get perfected and they
stop building them in huge numbers. I might add. They're
also issuing his nineteen eleven pistol to troops. So this
one guy is arming the American military except for rifles,
and so he gets all sorts of attention and people
want to know who he is, and there were all
these profiles written about him. But the interesting thing missing
(22:35):
is him. There's not one quote from Browning in any
of these profiles. His brother Matt must have issued press
releases to people about his brother, because a lot of
these artificsts sort of quote the same anecdotes. But you
know they're asked about, well, why do you make guns?
I mean, guns have been controversial with water American history.
(22:55):
The pro gun and anti gun fighter is not new
to this era. Well, one reporter got Browning to agree
to let him paraphrase him, and here's what Broning said
when asked him. He was asked, why didn't you make automobiles?
Browning assured readers that he was a peace loving man
who deplored war, indeed, had spent most of his career
(23:16):
making sporting arms, but was compelled to answer his nation's call.
So Bronning is now famous. But you know he's not kid.
He's in his sixties at this point. He is. His
son and Matt's son are taking over part of the
business side of the operation. But Broning in nineteen eighteen
(23:37):
is asked to invent another gun for the military, and
this gun is probably in historic terms, is probably the
most his significant invention. The tanks had appeared on the
European battlefield, and the American military wanted a machine gun
that was powerful enough to penetrate tank armor, so they
(23:59):
asked Bronning to to create something that could fire a
fifty caliber round. That means a bullet that's a half
inch wide. And so Browning goes to work and he
uses as the basis for that design for the machine
gun he invented in nineteen hundred. So, I mean, that's
how it advanced his mind work and what he invents.
(24:20):
He dies in nineteen twenty six and the gun's not
finished yet. It was so powerful that it was difficult
to keep on target, and brown came up with the
new recoil system and did other things to try and
make a controllable But what he invented is the fifty
caliber machine gun the end. Two. Why is that significant? Well,
(24:40):
every American airplane in World War Two, every fighter plane,
every bomber was armed with Broning's machine guns. So there
wasn't an air battle fought in World War Two by
the Americans that didn't use Bronings guns. His guns also
armed the British Spitfire and Hurricanes thirty guns during the
(25:00):
Battle of Britain and eight guns in each spit fire
and a hurricane. And the British will tell you that's
what won the Battle of Britain. And there's a British
engineer says, you know, fighter planes are great, but I'm
paraphrasing here, but essentially their quot ornaments if you don't
have guns in them that work. And the British had
picked Browning's thirty caliber gun because they were faster and reliable.
(25:22):
You know, if a gun jams and the wing of
an airplane, you can't go out and fix it, so
you had to have something that would work quickly and
that would reliable and wouldn't jam. The same thing with
Browning's fifty caliber gun. So all those P fifty one,
Mustang's Lightnings, Thunderbolts, the B seventeen, the B twenty fours, everything,
I mean that literally is armed with Bronning's machine guns.
But that's not all. So the armies out there and
(25:45):
what do they use their automatic weapons at that time?
At Browning's World War one Browning automatic rifle and this
thirty capital machine gun and it's nineteen eleven pistol and
the only other well, there's two other sort of major weapons,
the garand rifle would which is a major factor, and
the Thompson submachine gun, which looks great but actually wasn't
(26:05):
all that effective because the short of pistol caliber cartridge,
and troops, particularly in the Pacific would complain it didn't
have the power to penetrate vegetation. And that's why they
preferred to Browning because a shot a larger cottridge. But
those were the major firearms used by the American military,
So one can honestly say there wasn't a ground battle
one that wasn't one thanks to Browning's weapons. And again,
(26:30):
you know, that's a major historical impact. You know, there's
not a major historical event in the world that hasn't
been affected by firearms for good or ill. You know,
firearms can save a life, take a life, They could
feed a family, they can wipe out a species. You know,
they occupy a spectrum from good to evil, and what
(26:51):
we do with them is sort of depending on ourselves.
What happened after Browning's death was that his son and
nephew took over the business and they imported guns and
sold them under the Browning name, originally from Belgium, and
then eventually from Japan, mostly made by a very good
(27:13):
firm in Japan called Moroku and sold by FN. It
turned out that in the nineteen seventies FN purchased the
Browning Company that's Fabric Nationale in Belgium, and so the
Winchester rifles designed by Browning and the shotguns sold today
come from Japan and are owned by FN and Belgium.
(27:33):
And the two fifty cab machine gun is still used
by the American Army today and by eighty other countries
around the world. They had in five attempts to replace
it with something lighter with more controlled recoil, but they've
all failed. Bronni would sometimes be challenged on why he
(27:56):
made firearms, and he had a response to that and
get it once in one newspaper article where he's paraphrase
and this is what the article says. He replied to
the effect that the world's need of guns still was greatest,
that the field of arms invention was infinitely larger yet
than that of the motor car. He is, however, an
(28:18):
ardent peace advocate, but recognizes the need of preparedness and
the fact that generations probably must pass through an error
of evolution and the use of force before the nations
will be ready by reason of scientific advancement and intellectual culture,
to beat their guns into plowshares and the swords into
putting books. And that was a wide they held belief
(28:40):
at the time. That was through are books published about
the theory that modern technology would make war impractically impossible.
Unfortunately that hasn't proved to be the case.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
And no, indeed technology did not usher in a world
of peace. But what John Moses Browning accomplished, particularly for
outfitting American soldiers in battle, American planes and British planes
in battle, well it could easily have saved the world
from the Nazi menace and Japanese imperial ambitions. And what
(29:14):
a story. This is a terrific job on the production
by Greg Hengler and a special thanks to Nathan Gorenstein
for sharing the story of John Moses Browning. His book
The Guns of John Moses Browning, the remarkable story of
the inventor whose firearms change the world, is available in
bookstores or wherever you get your books online. And what
a story to tell about the inventiveness that started way
(29:38):
back in that shop of his fathers at the age
of five, We learned this over and over again the
Wright brothers, no big PhDs from colleges know theirs, was
making their way in a bicycle shop as mechanics. And
what we learn here is for fifteen years, as Nathan said,
John Moses Browning got a PhD in firearms engineering. Ever
(30:01):
since he was a boy in his father's shop. The
story of John Moses Browning here on our American stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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